Listening to The New School

Why podcasts?

At the time we began this project, we also began work on a series of podcasts (available here). Our engagement with New School history already spans multiple genres -- a website, an exhibition, all manner of talks and the current seminar here -- in its effort to invite more and more ...
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New Histories

A new three-part podcast on the histories of The New School

Episode 1: A Place to Go for Adult Values The centenary of The New School offers a chance to look at a university that began as an educational experiment and critique of higher education. Nothing has changed more than the school’s shift away from its original mission as a school devoted ...
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The Writing on the Wall

Orozco, Benton, and Arnautoff

Student and activist groups have campaigned for the removal of the murals, arguing they were detrimental to the education and well-being of students of color, who had to confront these images as they walked the halls or ascended the staircase. On the other side of the debate, art historians and ...
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The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College

100 years in, the New School’s experimental ethos lives on

Most American universities start as 4-year colleges, eventually adding masters and doctoral programs, professional schools and conservatories, and ultimately continuing-ed programs. The New School did things pretty much back to front. It took the better part of its first 100 years to establish a 4-year undergraduate college. This wasn’t an ...
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The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College

True to the Paradox

An exhibition for the centennial of a contradiction

This essay was originally published on August 21 2019. To mark the centennial, The New School approached Anna Harsanyi and myself (we are both alumni of The New School) to curate an exhibition in the Sheila Johnson Design Center. For me, the task raised many questions, bringing me back to the ...
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Sex for Fun: Reflections From Ann Snitow’s Przegorzały Classroom 

Ann Snitow helped change the discussion around sexuality in Poland, and she also changed my life.

In 2017, I published a book about the history of sex education in Poland. To See a Moose describes how Polish sex education textbooks under state socialism and after dealt with sexuality related issues. Although in many ways progressive, these books treated sex elliptically. Instead of talking about sex, they were full ...
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Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of The New School

The longest-serving member of the faculty was instrumental in helping Alvin Johnson to organize the University in Exile in 1933

Kallen's name, it seemed, was indelibly connected to the New School. And yet, it was only an accident of circumstance that this was so. Horace Kallen was among the first lecturers at the New School in Spring of 1919. Probably no one was more surprised at this than he. Beginning in ...
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Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of The New School

A Case of Contesting Visions

Academic freedom at The New School

According to a report by Vice President Al Landa, who was called to the scene, the disruptors continued “to hoot and holler accusations and epithets” at Gideonse and were “on the verge of doing something physical.” The grad students’ account of the incident does not indicate an intention to do anything physical, but otherwise ...
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Nurturing Subversive Seeds

What The New School’s Mobilization taught me

Most folks at The New School today haven’t heard of “the Mobilization,” the series of protests over questions of diversity and inclusion which convulsed the campus between 1996 and 1998. But I learned about it on my first day as Eugene Lang College’s first Director of Civic Engagement and Social Justice. ...
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Nurturing Subversive Seeds

How to Mark a Centennial

Telling the Story of the New School at 100

“In 1896, a minor event occurred in New York’s art world that would, in time, transform American art education.” So began the sample script sent to 60 Minutes by the consultant hired to help make the upcoming centennial an event of national significance. CBS didn’t bite, and the proposed segment never ...
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How to Mark a Centennial

The New School’s Paradoxical Archive

How a school focused on the future has learned to love its past

If an archives is perceived to be a site of retrograde nostalgia whose purpose is to revive conservative, old ideas, then a shadow of suspicion is cast over a university archives, too. The very idea of an archives does not align, even outwardly conflicts, with The New School’s idea of itself. It’s not ...
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The New School’s Paradoxical Archive